SuiteCommerce In Store (or SCIS) is NetSuite’s user-friendly point-of-sale platform for businesses already on NetSuite. In contrast to the more robust NetSuite Point-of-Sale (or NSPOS) platform for enterprise users, SCIS is designed to be run on tablets and features a minimalistic user interface designed for fast order processing and quick onboarding of new sales staff. While SCIS is a good platform for certain customers, it is not a fit for all businesses – especially those with complex requirements. In this post, I’ve review five signs that SCIS may not be the right point-of-sale interface for your organization.
- High number of line items per transaction
SCIS has a limitation of 200 lines per transaction. If you are in a wholesale or high-volume business, then you may find this limitation prohibitive. While large orders can be broken up into multiple transactions, this can cause reconciliation issues for both you and your customer, since many large-volume purchasers prefer to pay for all items on a single check or credit card charge. Also, transactions nearing the 200-line cap will experience reduced performance and slower processing time.
- External e-commerce platform
If you need to support omni-channel transactions and have a non-NetSuite website, then you will likely experience some integration issues when trying to process returns. Many third-party platforms convert line-level discounts to header-level discounts when passing transaction data over to NetSuite. For example, if a customer placed an order on the website that included two $10 items – item A with a 50% discount and item B with no discount - it would be passed over to NetSuite as two $10 items with a header-level discount of 25%. If a customer tried to return item B in store, SCIS would see the original purchase price as $10 with a 25% discount (applied from the header) and would only refund the customer for $7.50 even though they paid the full price of $10. This specific use case would not apply for organizations already using SuiteCommerce Advanced (SCA) or SuiteCommerce, but is worth noting for customers on other platforms.
- Large number of locations
SCIS is ideal for organizations with five or less points-of-sale. For larger operations or for businesses that are growing quickly, SCIS is likely a bit limited in features and somewhat too cumbersome to manage long-term. For example, sales reporting that is provided via the SCIS interface is based on a series of saved searches constructed for each location. Should you need to make a change in reporting logic (i.e. exclude gift cards from sales reporting), then you will need to adjust the saved search for each location independently, meaning that an organization with 50 stores would need to make the same logic change 50 times. The same situation is also present in role management (since each location has a distinct set of user roles) and location-level preferences.
- Highly-customized business processes
If your company sells highly-specialized or regulated products, or if you need a lot of flexibility to capture custom data points or make standard fields mandatory/not mandatory, then you may find SCIS to be too limiting. Because SCIS is still somewhat new relative to other NetSuite modules, much of the core functionality and supporting code is locked down, meaning that even adequately-skilled developers will be unable to make changes if there is a need to customize a standard process flow.
- No NetSuite Administrator on staff
As I’ve touched upon in previous points, some of the configuration and maintenance of SCIS is complex. Without a dedicated and experienced NetSuite Administrator on staff, troubleshooting minor issues, making light configuration changes, and onboarding new staff and locations becomes extremely challenging. If you do not have a staff member who is experienced in working with custom fields/records, saved searches, and custom forms/templates (and has availability to devote time to working in SCIS), then this may not be the ideal platform for your organization.
Want to know more about point-of-sale options in NetSuite? Contact Concentrus today to discuss which POS system is the best fit for your business.